Jimmy Savile’s Victims Are Finally Being Heard

Screengrab

“I remember watching Jim’ll Fix It and seeing a kid sitting on his knee and being jealous,” documentary filmmaker Olly Lambert tells me, with a sense of disbelief. “I wanted to be the kid sitting on Jimmy Savile’s knee.”

It’s been four and a half years since Jimmy Savile died, and three and a half since reports of sexual abuse started to surface in the press, sparking Operation Yewtree and a subsequent criminal investigation into Savile—as well other media personalities—which would see 450 people come forward and allege abuse against a man once considered one of Britain’s greatest “national treasures.”

Now, of course, Savile’s name is synonymous with child sex abuse, scandal, and a nation’s shame, his entire life and career obliterated by the crimes he committed over the course of six decades. Safe to say, no-one is jealous of the child that got to sit on Sir Jimmy Savile’s knee now. Least of all Lambert, who has spent the last 18 months interviewing a clutch of the several hundred people (then children) who were abused by Savile and others, gathering their testimonies for a new BBC documentary; Abused: The Untold Story.

“It’s a really bold commission for the BBC,” says Lambert, who won an EMMY and BAFTA for his 2013 film Syria: Across the Lines. “I think it shows real guts.” The BBC did not fare well in the wake of the Savile revelations, with accusations of a cover-up and the widespread disbelief that nobody could, or did, do anything to stop him. But this film is not about how institutions—the BBC, the NHS, the police force—failed to bring Savile to justice during his lifetime. This is about the victims.

“There is a really important film to be made about institutional and personal inaction, about who knew what and when,” says Lambert. “But that’s a different film. To me, the personal experiences of the victims of abuse felt really underreported. One woman said to me that she was really pissed off that when it all came out, the obsession was with the BBC. It took away from her experience. She said that no-one was talking to her and what was being documented and reported wasn’t helping people understand why it was so bad.”

Too often, victims’ experiences are reduced to salacious details in newspapers and we learn little of the actual stories, and their lived consequences, behind the click-bait headlines. Lambert’s film seeks to set this right, to bring to light the long-lasting, life-changing effects that Savile’s assaults, and child sex abuse as a whole, have had on those involved. Savile’s crimes were largely (although not all) opportunistic—a few minutes behind a locked door in his dressing room, a caravan, or hospital room. In the majority of cases, Savile’s victims would never see their abuser again, save for the times his face would appear on their TV screens. But ten minutes are enough to change the course of a life.

“The beating heart of the film is the way these single events configured a lifetime,” says Lambert. “Take Dee Coles, the first person I interviewed. Her assault was probably less than ten minutes and it happened 40 years ago. But it has shaped every facet of her life. It changed who she could have relationships with, and how she had relationships. Because of what Savile did to her she vomited, which means she has a phobia of being sick, which means she can’t ever get on a plane. If she’s on the last bus home and she sees someone who she thinks might be sick, she gets off and walks. This woman’s life has been completely reconfigured by these few minutes.”

What is also clear from the survivors’ testimonies is how, decades after they took place, these events are still being lived. “I was told in training by the NSPCC that the term ‘non-recent’ was preferred to ‘historic’ when talking to adults about the abuse they had suffered as children,” Lambert says. “At the time I thought it sounded a bit politically correct, that it was just semantics. Then I met Dee and the penny dropped, because there was nothing remotely in the past about her experience. It was in the room. You could smell it.”

It can sometimes be hard to understand, as a viewer, why it has taken so long for the survivors to speak out, or how they were able to keep such an experience secret for so long. But the fear of not being believed is great, and given how “roundly vilified,” as Lambert puts it, some of the women were when they first spoke out, that fear is sadly not always misjudged.

“I think abuse, especially on this scale, is subconsciously too distressing an idea for people to engage with,” says Lambert. “People don’t want to think that it’s true and that can translate as ‘I don’t believe you.’ There’s a quote from Keir Starmer [the former Director of Public Prosecutions] which didn’t make the film, where he says, ‘People find it so difficult to consider that this actually exists in the world, that they would far rather not believe the people that are reporting it.’ It’s a big problem.”

And people did report it. Three women, unknown to each other, came forward to the police during Savile’s lifetime with reports of sexual abuse. But because of the way their allegations were handled, Savile was never prosecuted.

“When you report a burglary, the police do not respond with, ‘Leave the window open did you? Insurance fraud is it?,’” Lambert says. “If you report a burglary, the position is there’s no reason to think that this person hasn’t been burgled. The police will investigate it. We need to handle reports of alleged sexual abuse in the same way we handle other alleged crimes.”

Watching the documentary, it’s all too easy to try and comfort ourselves with the knowledge that that these crimes took place (in the most part) in the 1970s (despite the fact that Savile’s last recorded crime was in 2009). And we like to tell ourselves that the ’70s were different to now, that people got away with things they wouldn’t—couldn’t—in modern, enlightened Britain.

But figures released in 2015 revealed that, in the wake of Operation Yewtree and the reporting of the Savile case, the number of child abuse cases reported to the police have increased by 60 percent in the past five years. Crucially, the majority of these crimes are not historic cases. They are not things that had happened “back then.”

“I would be very surprised if we’ve got a public figure operating on the same scale as Savile today, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” says Lambert. “It’s just gone somewhere else—on the internet or the dark web. I don’t want to leave the audience with a sense of ‘Go back to sleep Britain, everything’s OK.’ The truth is that there are lots of people out there who like to rape children. And that truth is really uncomfortable. That’s not to say the world’s a really horrible, dark, dangerous place, but it’s important to know about it. And if we’re going to solve it, we’re going to have to look that horrible monster in the eye.”

The Survivors Trust has a full list of helplines for people who have been affected by sexual abuse.